As mentioned, the brick wall was partly not being able to find a howto guide for this hardware - thus I thought creating a thread/wiki may bring some others N11S users out of the woodwork, along, of course, with getting the page indexed, so others who are searching can find and contribute to this thread and the corresponding wiki.

The rest of the wall is my lack of experience with gentoo, and have indeed been following the handbook, with some success, and thought a thread may be useful for exchanging ideas etc.